Humility Helps

By Fester:

Andrew Exum is commenting on the Lebanese elections and has a simple insight that should be taken to heart by any American policy maker:

In general, it might be healthy to admit that what we did and did not do in Washington had a far smaller impact on these elections than what the Lebanese did and did not do in Lebanon proper.

This simple lesson in humility and non-American exceptionalistic ego-centrism would be an extraordinarily valuable lesson that could inform most schools of foreign policy thought and most operational doctrines of foreign policy and military policy implementation. It is not always about us. Local facts and local issues matter, on the whole, a lot more than distant preferences that are often moderately uninformed by the local mileau.

Humility helps. It is not always about the United States as there are many situations that have their own internal logic that is minimally related, at most, to the day to day political drama in the United States.  This removal of ego-centrism is a useful analytical tool as I noted in 2004 regarding a right wing blogger trying to impose a US political explanation on unrelated activities in Iraq:

In response to the coordinated bombing attack against a ceremony celebrating the opening of a sewage treatment plant that killed 35+ children and wounded ten or more American soldiers who were present, Roger Simons makes the following comment:

Is today's carnage in Iraq...... timed for the debate tonight? It's hard to know, but it's far from impossible. We do know, the terror mongers have tried to influence elections before,

I need to respond to this idiocy. The attack was brutal and I wish it did not happen, but Mr. Simons needs to get over himself and his extremely narrow viewpoint. Not everything that is happening around the world is occurring because of its potential effect on the upcoming US elections.

The Iraqi insurgents have been operating on their own rhythm and motives since the very beginning and although there is a political and propaganda component to it, it has not been specifically targeted at immediate inflection points. Instead it has been targeted at isolating the battlefield and dictating a situation where the US becomes more isolated and less able to create winning situations

It is very seldom just about US.